Slow Thoughts

When it’s time to be in a hurry, slow down.

Slow down your expectations, slow down your actions, slow down interactions—ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

When it’s time to engage, do it with courage.

Do the hard work of engaging with radical, meaningful self-awareness—physician, heal thyself.

When you’re afraid of the answer, seek scarier questions.

Have the realization that the hard questions don’t need you to think more about which binary answer you’re going to commit to, instead the hard questions need slow, high quality answers.

When the answer seems obvious, you’re probably repeating an answer you’ve always taken for granted as being true–or right.

Stop doing that.

Get under the skin of your conflicts, your communications, your story, and ultimately, yourself.

True Measure of Leadership Through Conflict

Leading people through conflict requires an emotional exchange between leaders and followers.

The leader gives inspiration, charisma, respect, and provides role modeling of a vision of the future, to her followers.

The follower gives encouragement, support, obedience, respect, and provides a feeling of self-worth through the act of deciding to follow, to the leader.

Often though in a conflict, both followers and leaders expect a one-way monologue rather than a two-way dialogue.

Leaders want the led to be quiet and follow without question.

Followers want leaders to listen or else be replaced by another leader who will.

The trouble with both desires (based in emotions not reason), played out in public, is that one side must bend to the whims and desires of the other, for goals to be accomplished, for visions to be realized and for emotional exchanges to be deemed worthwhile.

The true measure of leadership through conflict, is rising above selfish and self-serving human desires and role modeling that behavior (which wins respect) for followers.

HIT Piece 3.14.2017

I’m typing this and you’re probably reading it on a mobile device.

One of the things rarely commented on is how reading comprehension—that is understanding and integrating a concept that you have read about into your overall life experience—has changed since the rise of the Internet as well as the rise of mobile phone use.

We often comment on the nature of reading and the nature of where content gets consumed and why, but the comprehension issue is so often assumed in readers that it’s rarely ever brought up.

Outside of teaching circles (and the circles of parents lamenting) the loss of cursive writing—or handwriting—as a practice taught in schools almost never gets the media ink (or digital bytes) that it seems to warrant.

But, I see this in my students that I teach: Increasingly, there is a lack of patience for the skill of writing by hand, carefully making letters that are intelligible to other readers. Usually, when an assignment must be handwritten, I get back sheepish looks with apologies attached about “chicken scratch” and “carpal tunnel.” I also get the same feedback from training groups featuring older adults who push back because I don’t put bullet points on my PowerPoint slides and I leave plenty of room in their training manuals that I design for them to take notes by hand.

Reading and understanding and hand writing are intricately linked in the human mind to learning, retention, memorization, and comprehension.

They are also intimately linked to patience, critical awareness, and deep thought.

We lose a lot by losing the ability or interest in writing by hand because the other option seem faster and “easier.” When we begin to value speed and volume over comprehension and patience we run the risk of valuing end results in spite of the process to get there, and we open the door to more conflicts flaring more brightly and for longer.

Categorization of Work in Your Head

Categorization is the way that we make sense as human beings of a chaotic world of choices and options.

Case in point:

Whenever we walk into a grocery store, the peas and the peanut butter aren’t on the same aisle. Peas are considered a vegetable (or a legume) and peanuts (despite their whipped nature) are a nut.

Sometimes they’re also an oil or a spread.

Just like the ordering in a grocery store, we order the experiences to understand the opportunities that are available to us (or not), the dangers, and the neutral spots.

When we think of our adult careers, we still think of the order the progression of time to the end of adulthood through the attaining of jobs.

Jobs are those permanent states of being where we advance, struggle, and succeed with other human beings in the pursuit of common goals, not individually chosen.

Despite what you have read, the attitude and characterization of work that needs to be done into “jobs” and then “everything that’s not” is not going away anytime soon in many people’s heads.

Instead what is on the rise is the categorization of work in terms of projects: Short bursts of work with a team that we did select (or who selected us) who are doing highly impactful work, at a smaller scale, that seems rare. This definition of projects is not to be confused with the project work we that exists inside of organizational structures that is highly controlled, highly experimental, and often not politically supported.

The other form of categorization of work that is on the rise are partnerships. These are states of pairing with someone else (usually another professional) to do short bursts of meaningful work and then to separate, sometimes permanently. Partnerships and their state of impermanence seem so rare that we often don’t categorize them in the space of work. Most often they are framed as rare, specialized opportunities that are available to others, but not to us.

Why does categorization of work experiences, career opportunities, and job prospects matter?

Because in the career and social chaos that is abounding at the end of the Industrial Revolution, the skills that we need to prioritize are not skills based in more credentialing, more training, or even more education.

Although that would be nice.

The skills that we need to prioritize are those focused around knowing your own capacity for risk and courage (self-awareness), developing persuasion and influence with others (storytelling) and being able to manage other people and crises when they occur (conflict management) as they will in a world of people working with people.

The skills that matter, that will take us to jobs, projects and partnerships that will fulfill us and get us paid, will focus increasingly around skills that once seemed “easy,” “soft,” or “not really valuable to the bottom line.” Moving learning and exercising these skills out of the category of “innately acquired” in your head to the category of “valuable to my career” is the first step toward growing and developing the kind of work world you want to advance in.

And the kind of workplaces that you want your children to advance in.

Culture of Immediacy

The culture of immediacy that we have created with our digital social communication tools, has convinced our brains that problems of all kinds should be solvable immediately, to our specifications, and with little effort (or friction) on our part.

Here are a few examples. Your mileage (and examples) may vary:

Climate change could be solved tomorrow…if only the “right” people oversaw the solutions. Like the people who populate my Facebook feed…

Elections could turn out with the “right” outcome with results that I could see immediately…just like a Twitter poll does…

People could treat each other with fairness, justice, and equality in a pretty cool and hip way…if only it were the “right” people doling out the fairness, justice and equality…and all others who don’t agree (or aren’t hip or cool enough) could be blocked or never seen anyway….just like in my SnapChat feed…

Rights, responsibility, accountability, and freedom. These are human conditions that took centuries to adjudicate, argue over, and have conflict about, to come to the space of where we are now as a global culture.

They will not fall to the growing culture of immediacy anytime soon.

Netflix, podcasts, YouTube videos, search results. These are tools of communication that operate on the principles of speed to market (your eyes) and entertainment (your brain).

The slow, plodding things that need to change (i.e. systems) are hard to shift, require emotional energy in the face of human intransigence and institutional friction, and need conflict to change. It used to be that we recognized and passed on to the next generation, the idea that incremental change was enough and that lifetime change (on the scale of anywhere from 35.5 to 78.8 years) was enough to get a society and culture to where it could reasonably be expected to be.

But this idea of plodding, incremental change is slowly eroding in the face of collective minds, attitudes, and behaviors being transformed by the culture of immediacy that our digital social communication tools provide.

Combine this fact with the reality that the inner workings (both the how and the why) of our digital social communication have become incomprehensible for the average person and that we have elevated this incomprehensibility from a minor annoyance (think about how you could repair a car in your garage only 50 years ago) to a belief in the magical genius of self-interested companies (think Google and how the algorithm of search works), and we have a giant problem on our global cultural hands.

Relationships with people are boring, mundane, exciting, and thrilling.

Solutions to people problems cannot be solved through the clever application of another frictionless algorithm.

People cannot be inspired through speed, or motivated through impatience to change.

The hard work, the meaningful work, the work of people conflicting against other people, is the last thing that will survive the cult of immediacy we have built.

If we let it.

And the changes that can come about from that survival is worth leveraging all the immediacy-based, incomprehensible tools for good, that you can.

Right Questions Right Answers

The issue is not the questions we ask.

The issue is knowing the right questions to ask, at the right time, and about the right things.

If you don’t know what the right questions are to ask because you don’t understand what’s happening in a conflict situation, then just blindly questioning isn’t a sign of curiosity.

It’s a sign of foolishness.

If you don’t know what the right time to ask a question is, because you don’t understand timing, don’t care about it, or are in a hurry to score a rhetorical point, then just shouting out a question isn’t a sign of resistance or “speaking truth to power.”

It’s a sign of poor intuition.

If you don’t know what the right things are to question, because you lack the knowledge, the time, the resources, or the emotional energy to do the research to find out about the background of the topic area you are questioning, then the act of questioning isn’t a form of discovery.

It’s a sign of lack of preparation.

Three ideas here can help for knowing the right questions to ask, at the right time, and about the right things:

Be curious but not naïve—or blind.
Chase intuition, then facts, then knowledge and wrap that around persuasion.
Don’t ever ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

And one extra: If asked a question, answer it honestly, truthfully, kindly, but firmly and with conviction.

The Magic Bullet Store is Out of Business

Very often, during a conversation, an email exchange, or following a workshop, the question of “Now what?” comes to the forefront.

Usually in talking about motivation, morale, or in creating the conditions that will make our workplaces better, a participant in the conversation will desire advice on how to get people to care more.

The response is that the magic bullet store is out of business.

And it has been for a while.

The real issue is that the current systems we have for education of our children (school), getting money to adults in an exchange for labor (work), and in taking care of both the Earth (capitalism) and the people on it (healthcare), grew up over the last 100, 200 or 500 years.

And no amount of hand-wringing (“It’s just terrible that this is happening?”), or desiring it to be better (“Can’t we all just ‘get along’?”) is going to change those systems in real, meaningful ways in the world we are currently living in.

The systems as designed are the problem.

Who organized the systems and what they believed is a problem.

The outcomes that benefit a few people philosophically, emotionally, and even spiritually is the problem.

The response to this is not to get mad, give up, or just ignore the problems in the systems and hope that they go away.

Or that someone else will come along and save us from ourselves and put everything “right.”

The response is to act to put your own hands to the levers of the systems in the sphere of influence that you can control (family, work, community, finances, social life, etc.), and begin to intentionally, purposefully, and deliberately push the levers of change.

And to do so with winsomeness, kindness, and grace.

But to do it tenaciously.

Persuasion, conflict management, active listening, responding to advance the conversation rather than to advance yourself, engaging without judgment to pull allies to your side—these are all skills that can be learned, taught, and passed on hand-to-heart, generation-to-generation.

Until we are thriving in the systems that we want to have, individually and corporately.

If the prospect of doing even 1% of that is too daunting for you as an individual inside of your sphere of influence, then you should be asking not “Now what?” but “What is it that I really want to accomplish in this limited life I have now?”

Fortunately for all of us, we were born at the beginning of a revolution in human affairs, human systems, and human motivations.

And all revolutions are scary and destructive before they are enlightening and hopeful.

Look for work first, and the hope will come.

HIT Piece 3.7.2017

Here’s the thing:

The only person at work who can change the culture of where you work, is you.

The only person who can manage adults as if they are adults, are other adults acting like adults.

The only person who can ensure that products, ideas, and innovations ship on time, is you.

Here’s the other thing:

If you believe that your boss has more responsibility, power, and accountability than you do (or if you believe that you should get more credit, and not take any blame if things go wrong) then you will doggedly pursue advancing in a toxic work environment.

If you believe that managing adults as if they are adults (instead of tolerating, condoning or ignoring childish behavior) is the purview of someone in human resources, and not you, then you will be constantly frustrated by conflicts in the workplace.

If you believe that your responsibility is not to “ship” but instead is to show up and turn a widget in a machine that you don’t really want to contribute to understanding, then you are preparing yourself inevitably for much larger problems in the future.

Here’s the conclusion:

The only person who can prepare for a future they can’t see, and prepare to do work that matters, and engage with hard, taxing emotional labor that pays off many tomorrows from now, but not today, is you.

It’s always been you.

This should be a thought that frees you, but for so many, the thought imprisons them further.

What’s that thought doing to you?

The Privacy of Memory

We lose a little of ourselves when we outsource our memory to Google.

But not in the obvious way that we think of.

What we lose in the privacy (some would say inaccuracy) of memory is the ability to forget.

And to be forgotten.

The privacy of memory and the palaces that we build in our minds of truths, facts, lies and stories is more valuable than we know to preserving the best parts of our fragile humanity.

In the rush to electronically preserve the truth in non-debatable, and factual ways, we are losing the pleasure (and the privilege) of the privacy of choosing what we want to remember—and what we have the grace, forgiveness and ability to forget.

When we can call out each other using facts we like that work for us (and avoid or dismiss the facts that don’t), our social media communications and interactions become about expressing the rawest of emotions with immediacy, in the face of overwhelming facts that are preserved as eminent, and indisputable truth.

Google can’t help us here. Neither can artificial intelligence. Neither can another social communication platform.

Only human beings can preserve the privacy of memory in relationship with other human beings.

Utopia and Dystopia in the Present

A friend once pointed out that he doesn’t watch films that portray either a dystopic future (i.e. Children of Men or Blade Runner) or a utopian ideal (i.e. Avatar or Gattaca) because they tend to be less than realistic.

There is a lot of talk (and writing) going around about the importance of either 1984 by George Orwell or Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as a literary or cultural guideposts in a time of rampant civic uncertainty and fear.

There are several problems with articulating–and living out–a worldview based off works by English authors of the early to mid-20^th century, but the biggest problem of all is the mindset behind thinking that authors of a dystopian (or utopian) future can possibly provide any actionable wisdom in the present day.

The specific problems are best articulated by others, but the general issues that face believers searching for truth in any conception of utopia (or dystopia) are three-fold:

Utopia (or dystopia) look different based upon your frame of reference. This is the main problem in applying the logic of utopia (or dystopia) to fleeting present-day political disputes and disagreements, rather than seeking longer term wisdom. The fact is, for every person who views a position as a dystopic one, there is a person who at the least views the position as not a problem. And for some, they view the position through the frame of utopian thinking.

The dystopia (or utopia) that a person is looking for (typically one represented in film or literature) is rarely exactly the one that manifests in the real world. The specific tent poles of culture, politics, and societal considerations are fluid and dynamic, not static and solid. There are elements of utopia (or dystopia) that manifest, but not all of them. Not exactly. And the fact is, when there isn’t exactitude in the manifestation of a prediction, the credibility of the predictor (and by extension the reputation of the prediction itself) seems to fail miserably.

How people think about what’s happening now influences how they mentally construct utopias (or dystopias), and then emotionally “buy-in” to them. This mental and emotional construction is more of an analysis about the nature of a present condition of conflict, rather than about genuinely deep conflict analysis. This is why films and literature aren’t good predictors of what will happen, what can happen, or even what should happen.

The fundamentals that underlie films and literature about dystopias or utopias are snapshots in time, representing a particular conflict mindset, and a particular set of perspectives on the world and events in it.

We would do well to be skeptical of attempts to glean too much understanding of current events from them, and would do better at managing and engaging with the conflicts we are currently in, by dealing bravely with the utopia (or dystopia) we’re creating right now.